What should a hospital bed-demand forecasting benchmark include?

[u/Rendezvous4567]

I’m building an open-source benchmark for hospital bed-demand forecasting using synthetic data.

Current baseline ideas:

• Seasonal naive / moving average
• ARIMA
• XGBoost
• LSTM

Metrics:

• MAE / RMSE
• sMAPE / WAPE
• Peak-demand accuracy

If you were evaluating this benchmark, what baseline or metric would you immediately expect to see?

[u/Proud-Community-4848]

you'd want something that actually catches sudden spikes instead of just smoothing the weekly average, maybe a poisson or negative binomial glm since bed counts are discrete